Archive for May, 2010

Google Picasa’s Facial Recognition Technology: So good, it’s freaky

1
643 days
by in Politics

I was playing with Google’s Picasa and Picasa Web Album yesterday. They have a facial recognition feature provided in both the desktop app and the web app. So the desktop app scans your hdd for pictures with faces, and the web app scans your albums for faces and gives you an opportunity to tag the faces. It was scary how accurate it was at both finding faces in pictures AND grouping them. Out of my album of 17 or so pics, it recognized that there were only 5 different people in them. Pretty freaky when you consider Google is required to comply with government wiretapping/spy requests, and that similar technology is being used in our traffic cameras.

Learning Dvorak

0
643 days
by in Development, Learning

My Dvorak stickers came in the mail. I mistakenly ordered ‘Programmer Dvorak’ which I thought was a sales term but actually no there is a keyboard layout called that. I meant to order just plain ‘Dvorak’, but was able to modify the stickers by cutting a few of them with razor blades. Now I have them on my home keyboard. I also have figured out a way toggle back and forth between QWERTY and Dvorak using SHIFT+CAPSLOCK. I also use the Scroll Lock LED on my keyboard to indicate which keyboard layout I am in. These are all settings in the keyboard layout part of Gnome in Ubuntu. Very nice. I also found a dvorak keyboard training site where you go start with the home row keys and practice typing all these combinations until you get a high enough accuracy to move to the next level. It’s been fun. I am going to bring the stickers to work on monday and do the same setup. Then I can practice all the time and when I get frustrated just hit SHIFT+CAPSLOCK to toggle back to QWERTY.

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